A Bohemian Eulogy- How the Cost of Living Crisis is Killing Counterculture and Independent Art

Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, circa 1980s- Although the parade still occurs every year, the unique culture of artists that birthed it is now with the undead. (Image courtesy of Curbed and Scott Laperruque)

“For masterpieces,” Virginia Woolf said, “are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common.” In the modern era, our culture has been driven by artists and the communities they build together; innovators set the tone, and the rest of society follows. So what happens when those communities get disrupted? What happens when we are no longer thinking in common?

For most of history, the work of the artist and the work of the propagandist in shaping culture were rarely distinguishable. From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, artistic tastes and movements were driven by the Catholic Church and other European elites who commissioned the greatest creators of their time. 

However, the rise of a new, urbanized middle and lower class in the 1800s, along with increasing access to education, meant that nearly anyone with the skill and passion to do so could become a reputable artist, regardless of whether they had an aristocratic patron supporting them. This movement led to a greater degree of artistic freedom and thought, propelling culture forward in unique and innovative ways. Communities of creatives and other nonconformists grew throughout the 20th century in cities such as New York, Paris, and San Francisco, producing the great cultural shifts and waves of the past hundred years. Jazz, beat poetry, rock music, modernism, punk, psychedelia, and much more all emerged from these milieus of bohemians.

But within the past 20 to 40 years, these communities have become threatened with extinction, as our current cost-of-living crisis threatens to return culture to the paid-for and fabricated systems of the past, where the wealthy and their institutions determined what was worthy.

This phenomenon, rather than being recent, can be traced back to the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 90s. Queer and LGBTQ+ communities and neighborhoods have long been associated with the arts, and the gay community is and has been well represented among artists, performers, and the cultural avant-garde. But by the year 2000, over 400,000 people had died of AIDS in the United States, including many artists and members of the gay community. As the epidemic hollowed out those communities, their neighborhoods and spaces began to be replaced by the rise of a new young urban professional class, beginning a process of gentrification within artists' neighborhoods that would continue and grow more acute in the following decades.

Greenwich Village in New York City stands as a hallmark example of this transition. The neighborhood was once famed for the Stonewall Riots, Punk Rock, and Andy Warhol, serving as a touchstone for American counterculture and independent artists. Now, however, it is one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the city, with median household incomes above $200,000 and an average rental price of nearly $4,000 per month. A similar story could be told about the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco; once a birthplace of beat poetry, the hippie movement, and psychedelic rock, it has now been transformed into a bastion of Silicon Valley moguls and tech bros. And in nearly every major city in America, the same pattern holds. How could new, struggling artists ever manage to rise under such conditions? 

Of course, when we discuss the destruction of these artists’ communities, we have to consider another, simultaneous disruption: the rise of social media. The omnipresence of online platforms has almost completely shifted the cultural conversation into the digital world. These spaces once held the promise of creating a new, globalized venue for ideas and creativity to spread organically. However, the nature of digital platforms has only increased the fragmentation of the broader cultural landscape, while also forcing smaller artists and creatives to increasingly bow to the pressures of what algorithms and the tech corporations that drive them deem as worthy of being shared.

Social media algorithms work by collecting data for users to determine what posts or messages they should be shown on their feeds and homepages. Crucially, these algorithms rely on the liked posts and messages of other, similar users as a part of their calculations. At the same time, posters will try to tailor their content to the algorithm so that it is pushed onto the feeds of more users. Under the older, location-based system, cultural shifts and movements would have occurred organically, through conversation and inspiration from other artists within the community. Now, however, with algorithms serving not only as the most important critic, but the only critic that even matters, artists are forced to create work that caters specifically to them, lest they doom their art to staying completely unseen. Reach rates are an important metric on social media, measuring what percentage of a creator’s followers actually see a post. For many artists present on Instagram, those reach rates were as low as 3.5%, an all-time low, and 12% below last year’s levels. Even if, in the past, artists remained unseen by the broader culture, the physical communities in which they worked allowed for their creations to at least influence the other artists and creatives around them. Now, even this seems impossible.

Declining reach rates demonstrate how the rise of social media has made life harder, not easier, for small artists and creatives. (Social Insider)

The most damaging effect of this change is the loss of diversity of thought and ideas within our broader cultural ecosystem. As all artists, across all genres, feel greater pressure to not work for themselves, but to work for algorithms, art is becoming increasingly homogenized into whatever is currently considered “Instagram-friendly.” As one article put it, “the platforms meant to showcase diverse creativity are instead creating aesthetic monocultures.” The only way to prevent this soulless standardization of our culture is to revive the physical spaces and communities in which artists were once able to live, create, and interact with one another.

Locally, the Washington, DC arts scene has seen many of these same challenges, exacerbated by the high rate of gentrification within the district. With an average rent of over $2,200 per month, 38% higher than the national average, many artists have found that the high cost of living and working in DC has made it nearly impossible for them to participate in the culture of the city. One local paper, The Wash, interviewed several resident artists, creators, and gallery managers about how the current cost-of-living crisis has impacted their ability to work, and found that “The rising cost of living in D.C. has edged local artists out of the neighborhoods that once supported their work.” One muralist, Ashley Jaye Williams, perfectly described how “artists struggle to gain notoriety and support despite contributing significantly to the cultural landscape of the city.” It does not bode well for Washington if the local creators who help shape its culture are no longer able to contribute to its future. Already, local cultural institutions have felt the impact of this decline. The theater group CulturalDC and artists' venue Capital Fringe both recently announced that they would be forced to sunset operations in the coming months, due to growing financial challenges and a lack of available resources.

As it has become harder for artists to make a living working independently, they have been forced to adhere more closely to the corporate world, with its promise of safer incomes, at the cost of creative risk-taking and the transgression of boundaries. The effects of this change can be felt at all levels of the contemporary cultural conversation. In the film world, the decline of mid-budget movies has been lamented since before COVID, as studios have held back from greenlighting the smaller projects proposed by their creatives, in favor of more sure-selling blockbusters. The slowdown of the Billboard charts is another notable phenomenon of recent years, as pop hits have begun to endure in our culture for longer and longer. As one source reported, “the average number of weeks spent on Hot 100 by songs in the top 20 is currently 30.35 weeks; five years ago, that number was just 18.75 weeks.” Finally, the rise of “nostalgia culture” among Gen-Z can be seen as the perfect example of this artistic slowdown. Although artists have always made callbacks to earlier eras, and trends have always been recursive, never before have these phenomena been as self-aware or as purposeful as they are today. The fact that the most prevalent trend of 2025 was the revival of the Y2K aesthetic, for example, shows how stagnant our cultural conversation has become.

So what can be done? Apart from the standard debates and proposals surrounding the cost-of-living crisis, such as building more housing, upzoning neighborhoods, or rent-stabilizing measures, there is much that can be changed, especially at the local level, to promote arts communities. Local and regional governments must provide funding, grants, and studio spaces for upcoming artists, while also promoting more venues for music and nightlife. To its credit, DC has recently made progress in several metrics, with the establishment of DC Arts Studios in Takoma and the opening of several new stages and venues in the past decade. These local changes are all the more important amid the current tone of federal funding cuts for the arts and humanities. Finally, at the individual level, it’s crucial to continue supporting small and local artists, visiting galleries, and attending events and concerts. Although it may not feel like making much of an impact, it’s important to remember that we are all participants in our culture and community, and we are all responsible for their organic growth. 

The truth is that the erosion of cultural institutions and the struggles of the artists around them is leading to the stagnation and homogenization of our broader culture. As smaller artists continue to struggle across America, it will become less and less likely that the cultural changes, revolutions, and movements that have occurred in the past will ever be able to take place again. These changes were always driven by new upstarts, previously unknown to the broader culture. The current cost-of-living crisis is suffocating a whole generation of artists, and it will kill a generation of culture too, if we let it.